


The Key Is To Be Remembered

by brokenmemento



Category: Grace and Frankie (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2020-01-16 03:14:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18512755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brokenmemento/pseuds/brokenmemento
Summary: Grief comes in many forms. Sometimes it takes loss to redefine a life





	The Key Is To Be Remembered

this body

               grows a garden of badly barely

healed

feelings

               I mean skin I mean

                                        go ahead and touch me

now

for I am wild

 

-Leslie Harrison from “Touch Me Now”

*****************

Somewhere deep, she sees it. Faint at first, but gaining clarity as slumber drags its fingers, pushing her down harder into its realm. Her subconscious is bleary on a few of the facts, begging her to forget some of what she’s done. Like she should throw out the ego and super-ego because they have no foothold here.

In her mind’s eye, she can see it all. Her bedroom, miles away. The lights soft, just like the blankets and the skin she can practically feel inside this lucid dream. The cool air on her toes poking out from the end of the covers, the warmth on and in her breast from what’s physically and emotionally below. Her hand weaves and sinks, lost and at home in the strands of brown here, gray there.

She can smell her. And no, not inherently in the sexual way that her body apparently wants now too, but the incense and broken paint scent. In layers, like her usual body. Something earthy, something real.

Grace, for all her pushing and running and deflecting, has ended up here anyway, hasn’t she? The lucid part knows that this is a mere illusion but it feels strangely like an arrival to something. To the part of her life she can’t keep ignoring forever. When she feels the coexisting textures of the indented, yet soft flesh of lips-the delicious connection of them to her own-it jolts her blue eyes open.

The ceiling fan turns lazily above her head, connected to a roof that’s still a little foreign. The aches in places beyond her control aren’t though, so with the delicateness of a ghost, she slips from her marital bed and pushes through reality to the bathroom nearby.

Her sweaty palm closes the door and she notices the elevated spike of her breathing. The tiny glow of illumination lets her navigate the space without instinct alone, so she finds purchase on the counter, laying her palms flat on the cool marble.

The fabric of her pajamas clings to her, asking for her to notice that her body isn’t cooperating and working at the normal temperature in which it thrives well.

Removing her hands from the swirled surface, she grabs at her top and pulls it away from her body. Scoffs at what’s below: peaked, painfully hard, whispering to be touched until they’re loved in a proper way finally.

Grace shakes her head then, lets go of the silk between her fingers and closes her eyes. Latent, forceful, she sees the movie she tried to escape when she left the refuge of her bed. (Because it’s hers now too. No debate, just fact.)

She’s eighty. Oh, she’s so beyond the point of where this should be not even a dusty remnant, but her ears can  _hear her_. Can actually internalize the quiet speaking of her words. Her own name, a beginning and an end in her apparition’s voice. Inside this thought, she rewards sound with touch, so glaringly real that she has to steady her physical body to not give out.

Her flesh prickles, warms. No longer able to shove this aside, she has to open her eyes. She has to let go. When her gaze meets the silhouetted figure of herself, she’s unable to move. She stares, hard. A part of her seems unable to examine herself on this level so idly, so she brings her hand to ease the lights up.

Still soft, not retina-searing. Grace can see her expression now though, can read it like a book. What startles her though is where her other hand has landed, where it’s come to rest. A thumb is hooked in the waistband of her bottoms, waiting for something.

She pulls her sight line back to the mirror, then speaks.

“If you do this, you can’t ignore it anymore,” Grace let’s loose into the night. Quiet though, repressed a little even.

This time, the vision slams with her eyes wide open. The sheer almost real feeling of fingers on her skin tracing her spine from below. How they mark tiny secrets further into her form with every pass up and down. Her heart lurches then constricts in her chest at the dual emotions of needing to be near her again and the agony of the choice she’s made which is 100 feet and a chasm away in her love.

The face staring back at her has the audacity to smile. It solves the puzzle for her. Resolution arrives and she knows what’s next.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. To her. To him. To herself.

It’s all-encompassing as she hooks her thumb with purpose, pulls the fabric away and ventures where her body has been calling her to go. When her touch lands, it’s not him she’s thinking of. It’s not the blank nothingness she conjures during a lot of the intimate moments either. It’s of what her heart has left behind. It’s of what she wants to go back to sometime.

When she comes, it’s the speaking of the only name she’s ever allowed herself to love in the right way.

********************************

She’d cleaned sand up for days after making the trek back to the beach house alone. Just when it seemed like not one single grain was left, a dusting of it would appear in a corner. Or be lying in wait under a discarded shoe or the abandoned gauze fabric of her clothes.

Frankie had decidedly left them where they were when she’d thrown open the door and tore them from her body. Remnants of the now worst moment of her life. She stood then, stripped and alone. She’d wilted again, taken in by the floor. Only when her naked body began to shiver had she buried herself under a blanket and prayed to not wake up.

The sun moves and disappears and she’s unsure how many days have passed when Babe shows up.

“You know, when I told you your bloomers were on backward, that wasn’t the recommendation for you to go without any indefinitely,” Frankie hears her say.

Even in what feels like her near death, Frankie marvels that her body manages a smile.

“Good thing I’ve got no chance of anyone barging in on me,” she assures. She rolls over to see Babe on her painting stool. She raises her hands palm up and shrugs.

“It’s Tuesday, Toots. And I’m mighty glad I descended because it looks like you’re circling the drain.”

Frankie waves her off. “I’m catching up on all the time I was forced to wear clothing and bathe and practice any sort of unauthentic life.”

“Not that being a nudist hippie isn’t something I didn’t do a lot of, but this is a little out there. Even for you. I’d ask why I was conjured but you know by now I always know before I get here. You both have a way of telling me while I’m still miles away.”

 _Both_. Like that word still applies. Like she’s part of a package or a pair or any word that doesn’t mean singular and alone.

“You owe me twenty bucks back,” Frankie frowns and leans back against the cushions. The blanket swaddling her begins to itch.

“Or maybe you owe me nine million,” Babe counters.

“What?” Frankie jerks her head up from looking at the ground.

“Oh, my sweet darling. You told me you’d give me $20 bucks to deliver your message. What we never discussed was what I’d charge to give you back the result.”

Frankie’s zeroed in now, no longer disinterested or moping. Her mouth feels dry like the sand she’s been trying to wipe out of her life since that horrible moment the air was knocked from her lungs and her heart stopped beating.

She looks at the ground, shakes her head to center her thoughts. “There’s nothing to give back because…”

“Because you think just because she married that man, that spells out the certain end of the two of you,” Babe interjects. “I don’t know if you know this, dear heart, but things like that don’t always douse the things already burning.”

“I’ve had a really shitty…” Frankie trails off because she has no fucking clue how many days have passed. “Time with all of this. She made her choice.”

“Hmm, if only she’d known. Right?”

“Why do you think I made that stupid, off the wall offer anyway? Not for shits and giggles, even though I do love a good shit and giggle.” She shifts uncomfortably on the couch. Jumps when Babe is beside her, gently bringing her closer.

“I know. I know. Because it wasn’t stupid, but it was an offer. Just not to me. You were offering Grace a truth in your way.”

“My truth, not hers,” Frankie sighs, feeling heavy. But also weightless too as Babe rubs life back into her bare skin.

“Frankie. You are the best part of Grace. And even though I can’t tell you she confirmed it out loud, what she didn’t say shook the ground of the earth. Her face,” Babe whispers like a lullaby. Frankie feels her eyes losing focus, drifting. Tugged to some deep place. “Her face was a book. The book of your life together. She loves it over every singular thing.” A quirk of her lips, the steady hand on her back. “She’ll come back sometime. This is her Santa Fe. Give it time.”

If this is even a fraction of how Grace felt when Frankie left, Frankie is eternally sorry. She’s sorry for a lot more things than that now too. The missteps are full of vibrators, angry things, and empty Adirondack chairs. They’re covered in donuts and cake and sand and Frankie can’t escape any of it.

“Why does it feel like I’ve lost my best friend?” Frankie murmurs.

“But you haven’t,” Babe says, growing increasingly farther off. “She’s the love of your life. And that is never easy.”

 _She isn’t lost_ , is the last thing Frankie thinks she hears before she lets sleep consume her. At least it’s something good to take inside of her dreams.

***********************

Grace lets dusk ache in her, another growing night of shifting allegiance. To her ears, the clang of her silverware sounds hollow, whittled to nothing by air and interference. Across from her, he sits, eyes almost the color of seafoam breaking on the shore, watching like a lion watching something die.

He sees a lot, she knows, because her plate sits full and her heart mostly empty of him. If she could push the contents around in it like the morsels on her plate. If only she could rearrange him in her to look more composed and less like mush.

Not speaking about the obvious is almost as unbearable as the pretending. She takes a sip of wine ( _wine_ ) and laces her face with a smile. Grace asks about Nick’s business ventures in Japan, about his office in California.

He answers in perfunctory sentences, scratches marks along her metaphorically, and she tries desperately to hold her tongue about how he can act however he wants because she’s been touching herself into oblivion with nary a thought of him on her mind. She wants to stand up, grit her teeth against the sight of him and say that when he disappears under the coma of sleep, she’s taken up a second residence in their bathroom. Her fingers are working overtime to the velvety, rich memory of the only other person who exists in her to a degree beyond Grace’s understanding.

Grace wants to say she comes in waves, like those by the house on the beach and the flowing of speckled hair that she longs to feel between her thighs.

“That’s just…” she begins but feels her words punctuated by a heavy sigh. “Great.” She finishes. The tired, too heavy, to keep out of her voice.

At some point he shuffles away, still kissing her on the cheek. What a floundering martyr he’s turning into. It sends more pangs through Grace that she almost lets wreck her, but she finds herself following the pattern she’s been following in the last few weeks.

When she enters their bedroom, Grace takes in the tan expanse of his back. They’ve been spending weekends on the water on his yacht, unmoored and careening through the Pacific. Wind has licked her own skin, deposited salt in a layer, sun crisping what’s been beaten already by brine and time. From underneath the cotton fabric of the sheets, soft gray matching the streaks of his hair, (other gray, too, far from this place) his legs and feet turned downward, body supported by the mattress.

Grace sighs again, in what seems like mere minutes instead of hours, and passes by him to begin her nightly routine. A snore, breaking on some breaths, hits her ears and turns her further inside of herself.

Behind the door, she’s alone to the world outside. Nick is removed, not far in actual distance but out of her mind as soon as the click sounds. Grace removes her silk slip of a gown from the hook nearby, strips bare and then replaces nakedness with cover.

By now, eight times later, (eight nights of longing) she doesn’t even have to look in the mirror to see the face staring back. The face that’s there belongs to exactly who it’s belonged to for the last five years. Maybe even the last three to four decades if she’s been incredibly hard and honest with herself.

It’s why now, when she rests the arch of her foot on the cold porcelain below and looks at her Ménage sitting not so forlornly on the counter, she can’t find it in herself to care much.

It’s the way of things and while her body should be shutting down at eighty, giving its final serenade to the world, it instead belts out arias to another body on an ocean shore in the distance.

Her shoulders roll at first touch, adjusting to the sensation. The sound never peaks above a purr. They’d talked about this in the design process: the need for discreteness. They hadn’t wanted to be on the other side of a wall (back then at least) with the other climbing the rungs of the orgasm ladder. Especially since Grace has never been the quiet one when she reaches climax.

Maybe it’s because she had so few of them in the Robert years. Reaching the height of pleasure seemed a distant feat incapable of being reached. Perhaps it’s why she’s been unselfish with words and gasps and moans when she brings herself to fruition because she’s been so tired of holding it in.

Nick might be on the other side of the door and the other side of the room and the other side of the bed, but he might as well be on the moon as Grace lets the tendrils of satisfaction curl, the hum of her vibrator and the thoughts of Frankie just as delightful.

*************************

There’s a calendar on the wall and Frankie tries not to get pissed every time she sees it. And she’d love to forget it because it makes her feel some kind of way, but it’s sort of nice to have it as a reminder too. She’s alive another morning and the whole Ordeal with a Capital hasn’t killed her like she thought it would. A stroke probably looms on the horizon though, licking its fingers and tittering when she eats a carton of Ben n Jerry’s to stabilize her emotions.

Babe shows up like clockwork, but Frankie can’t bear the heavy topic of their last semi-recent discussion. It’s back to turbans and talking about the good ole days of too much pot and loud music and getting shitfaced with almost every dignitary this side of the Great Wall.

It’s easier to hear these things, to lose herself in the stories of grandeur and charm. Babe takes to combing her hair as she unravels yet another yarn and for a few minutes, Frankie is elsewhere. She’s a character in the story, venturing an unfamiliar setting. Babe gives her this, expecting nothing. Frankie, after all, has done the ultimate deed.

“And there I was in the middle of the Mongolian steppe, snow-capped peaks in the distance, when I exit my ger and see a traditional morin khurr and a small fellow up to my armpit. The fire was blazing and we danced all night, I tell you. I think I gorged myself on buuz and Soviet Union vodka that evening,” Babe laughs heartily, her eyes turning to slits in amusement.

Frankie imagines the rocky terrain, the smattering of grass trying to exist in one of the coldest places in the world. Her own self a blade, clinging to the surface of Grace.

“You’re wandering, sugar. More than the time I locked myself out of my house naked and tripping on shrooms one Saturnalia.”

“Babe…”

“They hadn’t perfected edibles yet!” she exclaims, shoulders thrown back in dignity.

“Hey! That’s my line!” Frankie retorts.

“Who do you think I got it from?” Babe says with a mischievous grin.

They sit in the lightness of the room then. Babe looks at Frankie, reaches out a hand and places it on her chest. Her eyes close with a flutter and a smile plays on her lips. It’s another way of reading her, feeling what’s coursing below.

“You’re healing,” Babe says satisfactorily, rubs a little on Frankie’s sternum in just the way that manages to soothe her well and good.

It would be easy to give in to the unspoken desire to fill the room with  _her_  memory today, but Frankie is trying here. Really, honestly, trying to let go and be all zen and shit about this whole thing.

While she hasn’t given up on the idea of pet poultry, the thought of it seems threaded to a double entity that doesn’t exist anymore. She’s taken to filling the holes with other things, not necessarily stopgap treatments per se, but things that mean just as much to others as they do to her.

Coyote, somewhere in the haze of her loss (yes, she can be strong enough to call it that now) got her back down onto a yoga mat in some tiny studio that smelled faintly of peppermint. She had wanted to tell him no amount of essential oils could inflate her heart with buoyancy again, but somewhere between downward facing dog and child’s pose, she’d found something soothing.

Faith is walking now, tiny hands into everything and learning every surface and texture. The unsure first release of an edge, the scoot of a barefoot into freedom, all of it exhilarating to watch. She feels every flinch and wince in her own body when she watches Bud struggling to remain a passive coach from the side, but has had to tell him more than once that everyone must learn to fall before they can fly.

Somehow amidst the body contorting and stumbled steps of brilliance, she’s learned that while a great piece is missing (the greatest, almost), other parts are good too.

“Maybe,” Frankie concedes with her own smile. When she looks next to her, the room is empty again, but as with every Tuesday, the ache gets shifted. Somehow, impossibly, she feels good.

Better than good. Almost like...before.

“A heart can be broken, but it will keep on beating just the same.” It comes out before she knows what she’s said. She smiles again through her words. She will be okay.

The calendar on the wall pushes into her thoughts, about how mere hours ago, she’d wanted to rip it from the wall. Time is already mending. After all, she’s made it through half a year. (Inexplicable) Maybe she can wake up tomorrow with a scar instead of a hole. That seems more fitting to hope for than anything else.

************************

Saying she gave it the old college try would be giving her more credit than she’s due.

When it happens, it’s less than extraordinary. Grace should have pegged him to be exactly like he is, but it’s all so heavy and she doesn’t think she can stand what she feels for another second.

It’s full of broken faces but lacks broken words. And once things start breaking, they really never stop. This all seems like a snowballing avalanche that began the night that Grace couldn’t bring herself to let go of control to anything.

So in the end, he lets her because he’s always let her, no matter what. It’s in the choosing again, and he’s been experiencing this for the last year. He ends in her way closer to where he began in her. Which, if she’s being honest, was how it was always going to go.

He knew, she knows, so he can’t fault her for inevitability really. What she can let him be angry for is letting him believe he had a chance.

She knew, she knows, because it’s been whispering and yelling in her ears for maybe as long as Babe accused her of.

The knowing of the both of them is perhaps why coming undone feels only numb and not like anguish.

She thinks of all of these things as she stands at the top of the steps, looking down at the pool area and the door to the house. Groveling doesn’t seem like the way to go, but neither does throwing her shoulders back and meeting her head on again.

How do you make someone understand that even though it’s not, your heart kind of feels like a creature: capable of living and dying? It understands shadows and can’t figure out the light, so different when it is able to transmogrify. That because of this, it gnaws on darkness and learns to live with it without trying to really be whole.

Which is why, Grace thinks, she’s been okay with separate pieces her entire life. Give one here, lay one there. Should it matter, being scattered? It was easy to let Nick pick up what had flaked off in the wake of Frankie. Even if she just now realizes how deep the pieces were wedged.

She’s still got a key, tucked inside of her gray sweater. It hits her what’s she done: that’s she returning in the same clothes she left in. As if there has been no time in between, no incidents or inciting event that shifted her entire life. Well, everyone's.

Her heart is racing as she turns the doorknob. What’s waiting on the other side may not have room to contain her anymore. Oddly, unnervingly, she’s met by silence and a creaking melancholy that feels like a leak, something gaseous and unnoticed. Capable of wrecking something unaware.

Preparatory time would be insignificant for this. There’s no way to tell her heart to ease up or let loose or do anything other than what it’s done since Frankie waltzed into her life: beat with wild abandon.

Nerves and fright and anticipation and longing twirl within her, a jerking dance of emotions she has to let be untamped. The thump of her heart is louder than any sound coming from the house (can she call it home still?) and it is unsettling. Thoughts begin to plague and Grace wonders if there’s still room in this place and this life for her, if Frankie can still look at her the way she did on the beach: with that same relieved conclusion before the jagged disappointment Grace had seen etch her face.

She wants her to appear. She wants to tell her that she’s been trying to fill a sad, hollow place ever since she heard Frankie quietly whisper, “Get away from me, Grace.” Metaphorically sheared at the knees, she’d somehow managed to walk back the way she had come, heart leaking anguish all along the sand.

The memory reel gets cut, flapping wildly, as Frankie breezes through the hallway and into the kitchen. Grace’s heart constricts and so must her throat because she tries to open her mouth, but nothing comes out.

Frankie opens the cabinet for a glass, depositing her mug into the sink (where, Grace almost gaps in astonishment, no other dishes sit) and makes her way to the fridge. She goes through motions, opening a bottle of water, pouring it in the glass, removing her prescriptions from the darkness and bringing them forth to rest on the counter. She works her hands with twisting off caps, sprinkling contents out for consumption.

The whole time, Grace watches, a silent thing asking to be acknowledged.

Because Frankie has to know she’s here, has to feel her presence in the room like Grace always does when Frankie’s near. An electric jolt, a flutter, an ache of wanting so badly yet needing just the same. Hadn’t the beach given them some form of the same thing? An answer to a question they’d both been avoiding for years, Frankie’s in the form of things cracking and silence enveloping, while Grace’s had come in guilt for wrong choices.

Because Nick was wrong.

He was an answer to a question, sure, but not  _the_  question of the course of Grace’s life. It’s hard to love something or someone when your heart has already been given to someone else. And finally, Grace had understood Robert after years of anger too. About why he had given her something else in the place of his love-because it was already resting in someone else’s chest.

“I know you’re there,” Frankie says lowly, palms spread out face down on the counter.

She doesn’t look up and Grace still can’t say anything. After months of not speaking, Grace can’t even will her voice to meekly apologize or cry in embarrassment or anything else Frankie should get right now. Instead, she takes a hesitant step forward.

Frankie shakes her head, talks to the water glass, the pills, the counter. Anywhere but Grace’s face where there continues to be everything. “I could have gotten the lock changed. To avoid intruders,” she begins and Grace tries not to die at the word choice. “But I figured after a few weeks and you not even trying to come home, your choice was made and your spare key meant about as much as I did.”

Oh, she’s got to be making a crime scene because she feels absolutely gutted and knows she deserves every carefully picked and pruned word Frankie’s stringing together. Water, hot, begins to prickle the corners of her eyes.

“And I could ask for your key back, you know, to be really petty and hurt you as bad as I’ve been hurting for the last six months. But then that would be anger wrapped in a lie, because as much as you walked over my heart that day on the beach, you’ll always have a place here. The beach house is 50/50 and even though half of it has been missing, it knows who makes it up. Us. Together.”

Somehow, miraculously, she manages to stay standing on two repaired knees and not a lot of resolve.

Frankie looks up, finally, and Grace wishes she could change so many things. She knows what her own face shows back, knows that she’s hiding zero of her emotions. It must be the face Nick saw every time he mentioned even the name of the woman in front of her. How her body would involuntarily tense and she’d go rigid with shattering.

“I touched myself thinking about you,” escapes Grace’s mouth without any permission at all. Her hands go to her mouth as a gasping cry also tumbles into the air.

“Fuck,” Frankie sighs and then rounds the counter to shakily sit down in the chairs waiting for collapse. When some silence has wrapped itself around time, she speaks again. “I haven’t painted in three months.”

Her eyes are somewhere else, on anything that isn’t in front of her, yet it feels like Grace can see clearly now. They’re saying the same thing, albeit in vastly different ways. The chord between, somehow connecting to the truth once buried impossibly deep but threatening the surface now. One is struggling in oppression, the other chaotically being free.

“Painting is your…”  _Life_ , Grace wants to say, but Frankie cuts her off.

“Yeah,” Frankie finishes and Grace tries not to feel it everywhere.

Frankie looks up then, right into Grace’s eyes, and where can they go now that Grace has delivered a dark corner of her heart and perhaps a section of Frankie’s too?

“I want to come back,” Grace states the obvious. Again, she thinks of space and emptiness and fullness and whether they’re really all separate or so finely connected that it’s hard to ever see. “I want to come home. To you.”

Grace doesn’t choose her words carefully, because she’s wanted to say those for as long as she can remember. That wherever Frankie is is where she wants to be too. And yes, it took a while to get to this point. There is so much piled up behind her, but those hills and mountains and roadblocks to this exact moment had to happen to her. It has had to take multiple breakings and receedings to where she could be the person Frankie needs. Finally, she knows she’s there.

“So, you’re admitting that there might be something between us? Something we’ve been dancing around for a while?” Frankie challenges and crosses her arms.

Without thinking, Grace drops the handle of her rolling suitcase and her purse thuds to the floor. She closes the distance between them and lets herself be awarded the feel of Frankie again, the firm softness of her upper arms on each side. Lightly, she applies her palms, let’s her fingers curl.

“I made a mistake. Again. And while you fixed my last one, this time, it’s my turn to set things right.” She feels the cotton begin to spin in her throat, forming a lump. It’s hard to continue but she wills herself to have the courage to say the things she’s wanted to for months, for longer. “I shouldn’t have married Nick. I shouldn’t have walked away from you that day on the beach. I should have…”

Sticky words, hard to pass on. The rest needing to be said at the risk of never getting to have. Another whisper, faint.  _Aren’t you tired of punishing yourself?_ With alcohol, with unhappiness. It doesn’t matter. She’s denied what she wants all of her life and for a large chunk of it, what she’s wanted has been near her or right beside her. Her body inches closer to Frankie, feels it press testingly, and she gives the rest of what she has.

“I should have told you that the only place I’ve ever felt I’ve belonged is here. That instead of feeling like I was living inside someone else’s life, I felt we created one together from ruins. That maybe that’s where we are now. That maybe we can build again. If you’ll have me,” Grace spills out, leaking the truth. Frankie’s face is unreadable and she can barely stand it. “And that day on the beach? I should have done this.

Their first kiss, created through sorrow and longing and a lot of other things that, simply put, take Grace’s breath away. The feel of Frankie’s lips, the roar of her own heartbeat in her ears, the prickling sensation of Frankie’s fingertips pushing into Grace’s arms are more and greater than anything she could have imagined.

Now, Grace’s supposes, this is who she is. She’s an 80-year-old woman who kisses her best friend after marrying a man she wanted to love, but couldn’t. She doesn’t pretend to own her heart anymore. It hasn’t been hers in years.

At some point it ends and she has to wonder about the aftermath. What happens to people who catapult themselves into wishes and dreams, or thoughts that never seemed capable of occurring?

When she pulls away, she doesn’t dare to open her eyes. She lets herself linger in the feeling of obtaining. The split line of her want and need ring true and deep now too, the destructiveness of the first often circumventing the next. Frankie has only filled the first box so far, a dangerous thing to crave because Grace destroys what she wants always. (Drink, crumble. Food, guilt. Sex, hollow. Love, disastrous) It’s easier to give subterfuge and act like all the world aligns accordingly instead of telling Frankie she wants more than she’s afraid Frankie can offer.

“Grace,” Frankie says, simple and alone. Begging for other words to join for detail sake. Does the uttering of her name mean entrance back into this life of theirs, the one she abandoned without stopping realize she was not taking heed to Babe’s words? Or is she about to be cast out, left to grovel at the feet of a man she has already admitted the truth to, in so many words.

She awaits her fate, whatever it might be. Frankie’s fingers move along the lines of her cheeks, press into her jaw. Then she backs away and Grace feels everything again. She watches as Frankie stands shaking her head, a hand idly whisper touching her lips like it wants to remember a little of Grace. Or wipe it away.

“Are you going to tell me to get away from you again?” Grace manages to not choke on the words. Frankie shakes her head but says nothing and Grace can’t imagine where life goes from here.

“It can’t be this easy, Grace,” Frankie says quietly. “Even if I want it to be, it can’t. I’ve spent a lot of time alone with this and it isn’t something that can magically disappear. You gave me six months of living with what you created and I don’t know what to do now that you’re here. There’s been a lot of shit happen with you off of the scene.”

Grace wants to ask,  _what_? She wants to beg Frankie to speak it all and give her everything. She wants to tell her to slide under covers with just skin and words and Grace will give her all the hours. She wants to tell Frankie she’s had her own shit too and then get rid of it with mouth and hand and sound.

“I know,” Grace responds with instead. Because Grace does know, even though exoduses from husbands is becoming a thing now. (No matter than circumstances on either, she’s walked out on two of them now.) And honestly, how many times can she cling to Frankie after them? She’s on shot two and shivers at the thought of any more.

 _You’re eighty, Grace_  something in her whispers again and she tries not to feel a broken down and trudging melancholy. There are likely to be no more shots.

Maybe she’s got  _this is my last chance_  written all over her face. Maybe she doesn’t. All she knows now is that she has no idea how this ends because ideal versus actual don’t really coincide. It seems dangerous to tell Frankie that this is sort of like the leaving she has done, but an even more desperate return because things are completely broken instead of only fractured.

Grace, by herself, isn’t her own beach. Alone, she doesn’t have wind beneath her wings. Singular, she’s nowhere near anything involving Frankie’s grandiose Bette Midler obsession. Solitary, she is only a fragment of an island, irrevocably attached. She’s a piece of a continent, a part of a main, less if said part is washed away by the sea.

There’s only Frankie in her now. Robert has lost hold completely and Nick never had it. She wants to be independent and capable of making it through these waning years by herself, but her body beats for the only one she’s ever felt good with all along. It whispers the name of the woman in front of her, a chant, a song, a prayer.

“So what do we do now?” Frankie sighs as if there are holes that Grace has poked into her resolve.

Grace shrugs and it isn’t elegant or anywhere near the right response probably because it makes her look like what matters and what doesn’t are exactly the same. Frankie nods, however like she 100% understands and Grace comes to understand too: they’re at the deciding point.

When Frankie says nothing, Grace slowly backs away. She’s lost somewhere between what’s happening and the past where Frankie’s lips were the only thing she wanted to feel. Her hand grazes across the handle of her rolling suitcase and she spins on a foot and  _what am I going to do, what am I going to do, whatamIgoingtodo_  swims through her head and roils through her body.

Her hand touches the door, feels the stinging of metal handle, tries not to let the red paint completely blur out her vision. She’s a second away from opening the door and walking out, to only God knows what or where, when she hears Frankie behind her.

“He can build, and buy, and take over absolutely anything he wants, yet here you are, standing on the doorstep looking like you’ve had the wind knocked from you completely.”

Grace doesn’t turn around because the ache is back, another form in its deceptive repertoire. This isn’t about want or need. It’s just shame, guilt, and loss sloppily rolled into one. Something is happening though, something, something, so Grace doesn’t dare breathe.

“I bet it’s irritating the shit out of him,” Frankie begins again and Grace finally turns to look at her. “Well, you probably need to look into calling some movers. You know how I am about weird double goodbyes, so I won’t make you go schlep your stuff back.”

There’s a tinge of playful in her tone, but wary caution too. Grace realizes she’s as scared as she is to see what happens next. That feeling lets her close the door and park her suitcase in the corner. That feeling lets her guard sag and drag its feet.

“Frankie…” Grace starts and begins to retrace her earlier steps. Back to Frankie. Maybe back home. She reaches out and takes Frankie’s hand, looks at her lips with longing. She’d like to feel them again, now, but settles for the potential reconnect later on.

“And I guess we should talk about shared space. I mean, otherwise, what has all this heartache been for?” she cuts Grace off from anything else she might have said.

They’ve been sharing for the last five years but the sudden change in the meaning of the word sends currents throughout her body. This altering, this creating a new pattern for the movement of their lives is the thing Grace has been tucking deep and out of sight for too long. She’s replaced the idea of it with other, more outrageous ventures that never had enough time to gain ground.

She keeps going back to the word, but oh, the ache of this all has aged her even more. Bones have become more brittle, her heart has shrunk in its cavity, her limbs have atrophied. Grace knows that she can’t heal the wound that time has created, that she has created.

But she wants to try. It’s the only rectifying she can do, to show Frankie that there’s no more leaving. At least not of her own volition. And while there are a thousand questions all containing how and why this unfurling of promise feels like an answer too. The equation was written long ago and she’s denied Frankie being a part of the solution.

“You want that,” Grace says with a shake of her head, never quite getting to the query because of awe.

“I want a lot of things, Grace,” Frankie replies with a simplicity that doesn’t match this moment. A small squeeze, quick like a heartbeat, grips her hand and she feels the tilt toward some amalgam of the old life she knows and the new one that’s coming.

“I do too. But Frankie, you’re in all of them. I know that now. I’m sorry it took so long to get here and that I went about this every way except the right one. But I’m here now,” she assures and hopes that Frankie doesn’t think it rings hollow.

If Grace can’t have Frankie’s mouth, her lips, then she’ll take her air. She rests her forehead against Frankie’s, still connected at the hand too, and eats the breaths she expels. They stand for a few quiet moments until Grace catches something different, something added.

Grace knows there’s not a whole lot of living left ahead of them and she’s not a fatalist or anything, but holding Frankie now seems like a thing she should have been doing for the last forty years.

It’s new, like kisses and confessions. Near, but tucked in the corner where Frankie usually keeps her wicker swing. Grace leaves the sphere of Frankie, walks into the room of soft light and changing space.

Strings of shells, shimmering and delicate ones, cracked and forlorn ones, colored glass creating fractals on the wall, and other ‘ocean junk’ as it were, but Frankie has managed to build and create. That’s when it hits Grace.

The pain of loss isn’t just dull and undefinable. Sometimes it’s acute, sharp and breathtaking. Hot, wet, sometimes sliding into numbness but a lot of times sticking and going on. And, it seems, people search for places to cauterize it, tie it off and move on without it hurting so damn much. Grace knows it doesn’t always work.

“I started collecting things to replace what I lost at the beach that day,” Frankie whispers and her shoulder grazes Grace. If she moves, Grace is sure she will shatter.

“I’m sorry I hurt you, Frankie,” Grace replies, wills her heart not to crumble.

“Well, I guess we’ve got the rest of our lives for you to make it up to me.” Grace looks over to Frankie who grins widely and the laughs. “That was so fucking cliche.”

They both laugh now, enough to let ease begin to flutter. She’s not sure how long they stand, holding hands. When she looks up again, out through the windows, the light has shifted all around.

The dark doesn’t deliver her from her sins, but it sends the volume of them to a faintly audible level. The body beside her hums its own energy. The moon, hanging low, casts muted light through the gauze curtains. Grace’s fingers, mothlike, follow along the curves.

She doesn’t retreat. She doesn’t use her own fingers to squelch desire rising. When Frankie lets her connect to places she’s seen in her nighttime visions, her dreams, Grace lets the magnitude of it coat her soul like a balm.

Tonight, Frankie reminds Grace that she may not have begun her, but she ends her. A throaty gasp, the act of achieving, severs what Grace has done to them the last half year. She’s chased this away inside of her for as long as she can remember, the space of them growing. Spreading.

“This is the way it's supposed to be.”

Said into the air, from Frankie’s voice, from her own. She can’t be sure. She quells the need for more, the need for everything. Time, fleeting, is here now. While forever isn’t guaranteed, there’s today.

Mending, blissful today.


End file.
